Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,323]

4 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Bizarre and reckless of Biden to do this -there was/is no way of knowing how Russia would respond. And the UK govt is just as bad - no vote by MPs as to whether its sensible to ifre British made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia.

Though not surprising as Kier Starmer is the first and only MP out of 650 to be inaugurated into an American Neo Con group Tripartite Commission

One thing you don't do in war is become shy towards the enemy.
So if I was a Japanese admiral could I say to the emperor "I 'm not going to Guadalcanal because the Americans are too strong there" ?
That kind of excuse would be sheer military nonsense.
Some excuse based on logistics maybe but to say in so many words "... because the Americans are too strong there" is sheer nonsense.
So therefore Ukraine are going to use the new weapons and use them again.

[KEVINAA 97]

 

[Vesper 28,803]

big loss for Trump

I guess a teen sex trafficker as the US top law enforcement officer was a bridge too far even for some MAGAts in the Senate

Edited Thursday at 17:48 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,848]

51 minutes ago, Vesper said:

big loss for Trump

I guess a teen sex trafficker as the US top law enforcement officer was a bridge too far even for some MAGAts in the Senate

Another one about to bite the dust ?

''Audio has been released of Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, comparing the president-elect to Hitler and suggesting some of his supporters were “outright Nazis” and “bootlickers”.

Clips were uncovered by CNN from Kennedy’s radio show “Ring of Fire”, when in 2016 the anti-vaccine activist applauded descriptions of Trump’s base as “belligerent idiots”

[cosmicway 1,323]

11 hours ago, KEVINAA said:

 

Eisenhower, General Zhukov ? Would those have been arrested as well ?

[Fulham Broadway 16,848]

There are yet to be any talks between Russia and the US as the situation continues to deteriorate and unravel.

The Kremlin dropped its deadly new Oreshnik hypersonic missile on Dnipro yesterday, as Ukraine continues to brace for further attacks. With Russia moving on the offensive, it was revealed on the country’s Telegram channel a meeting has been called for tonight amid fears of a new war which is dragging the world closer to the end.

Reuters

Happy days

[Fernando 6,462]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

There are yet to be any talks between Russia and the US as the situation continues to deteriorate and unravel.

The Kremlin dropped its deadly new Oreshnik hypersonic missile on Dnipro yesterday, as Ukraine continues to brace for further attacks. With Russia moving on the offensive, it was revealed on the country’s Telegram channel a meeting has been called for tonight amid fears of a new war which is dragging the world closer to the end.

Reuters

Happy days

He will wait for Trump and do the deal. 

[Vesper 28,803]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-22-trump-cabinet-sexual-assault-gaza/

Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense.

 

The presumptive Secretary of Education is married to a man whose former employee alleges he forced her to perform sex acts with his friend for an hour and a half after he defecated on her head. The presumptive Commerce Secretary preemptively sued his former assistant in 2018, after her lawyer threatened to publicize “not pretty” 2 a.m. text messages she’d received from him and his wife. The presumptive Health and Human Services director’s explanation for forcibly groping a former nanny’s breasts while holding her hostage in a kitchen pantry was that he “had a very, very rambunctious youth”; he was 46 at the time. The White House efficiency czar, currently a defendant in a putative class-action lawsuit filed by eight former employees who accuse him of perpetrating an “Animal House” work environment of “rampant sexual harassment,” and paid a quarter of a million dollars to a flight attendant who says he got naked and asked her to touch his erect penis in exchange for the gift of a horse. 

And of course the presumptive Defense Secretary was accused of raping a woman who was tasked with monitoring what she described to police as his “creeper vibes” after a Republican women’s conference at which he was a keynote speaker, just a month and change after the birth of his fourth child with a woman who was not his wife at the time. (Reader, she married him.)

The aggressive rapeyness of the second Donald Trump administration is so tyrannical it’s almost enough to make a girl wistful for Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who withdrew his name from attorney general contention yesterday (to make way for the despicable Pam Bondi) amid an orgy of leaks from two investigations into his sexploits with a 17-year-old procured by a convicted sex trafficker friend. Multiple witnesses testified that Gaetz did not actually know the 17-year-old was underage, you see, and that he ceased having sex with her when he found out. 

I don’t have a lot of warmth in my heart for Barack Obama, but America will always have the fact that he was never a world-renowned horndog. When he took office, as I remarked a year ago in an essay about founding Jezebel, the entire culture was dominated by networks of organized sex abuse. The coolest clothing brand was run by an unabashed sex predator. The second-coolest clothing brand was run by a recently indicted sex trafficker. The predominant underwear retailer was a front for Jeffrey Epstein, who was propositioning young women while literally serving a supposed “prison sentence” for sex crimes. The Vatican was helmed by a guy who spent his entire career covering up sex abuse accusations. Republicans had just lost control of Congress to revelations over their complicity in the systematic teenage intern abuse of a prominent Florida congressman and others; the Speaker of the House at the time quietly stepped down and would later be revealed as a systematic child sex abuser while he was a high school wrestling coach in the 1970s. The Abu Ghraib scandal showcased ritual sexual humiliation as a top American export. One-fifth of female veterans were diagnosed with disorders stemming from sexual trauma. Insatiable serial rapists ran the movie business and the music business; children's television was dominated by an accused pedophile, and so we would learn was the Penn State football program, USA Gymnastics, organized cheerleading, and of course just about every sector and obscure subsector of high and low finance.

During the Obama years millions of manufacturing jobs were wiped out, income inequality gaped, opioids consumed whole communities, and the titans of finance who collapsed the economy through fraud went unprosecuted, but “rape culture” retreated. Kid Cudi stole Diddy’s girlfriend, Kendrick Lamar made rap poetry again, the star of the era’s top-grossing movie franchise spent her down time in the Dakotas getting arrested for protesting oil pipelines. “Wokeness” in those early days conveyed a kind of vigilant neo-wholesomeness. It seemed in those days self-evident that sexual abuse was just a subset of dehumanization and exploitation that helpfully, unlike most forms of exploitation, happened to be illegal. 

And the moral core of resistance liberalism was a rejection of dehumanization in all forms. Where both Hillary and Trump had tried semi-successfully to redirect rape culture backlash against one another and other enemy tribes—the apocryphal “Bernie Bros” for Hillary, immigrants for Trump—the Pussy Hats found the apex of their cultural cachet fighting for someone they didn’t know: mothers whose babies had been seized at the border and warehoused in massive colorless child prisons, per a policy that had been somehow initially enacted under Barack Obama. It is so easy to forget now how the success of that movement led Ivanka Trump to lobby her father to issue an executive order 18 months into his presidency that ended the separations. During the pandemic again, resistance outrage on behalf of the invisible “essential workers” brought immediate material gains to nursing home aides, delivery drivers and meatpacking plant staffers in the form of hazard pay, government checks and a new sense of their importance within the broader community. 

But powerful forces wanted desperately to absorb the “resistance” into the profitable realm of insular partisan tribalism we know as “identity politics.” A random moment lodged for whatever reason in my hippocampus was the afternoon a gaggle of female attorneys with “I believe Christine Blasey Ford” pins on their handbags filed into happy hour at my obscenely expensive restaurant. I believed her too, one thousand percent, but the pins were… just a bit much. Years later I’d watch Brett Kavanaugh, in all his heinous glory, pompously inveighing against opponents of the deal that enabled the Sackler family to abuse the bankruptcy code to keep their multibillion-dollar fortune legally off-limits to the hundreds of thousands of families their opioid empire’s deliberate conspiracy had torn apart. Clearly his high school boorishness had been merely a harbinger of a legacy that would ultimately prove much darker. But as long as the affluent teenagers who’d been victimized by his like grew up to become corporate lawyers and lobbyists, no one was really incentivized to spell out those connections. 

When some genius at Kamala HQ concocted “We are not going back,” every woman who believed Christine Blasey Ford knew in a visceral sense exactly what that meant. After raking DJT over the coals for schtupping Stormy Daniels 18 years ago and attacking E. Jean Carroll in the Bergdorf dressing room the same year Bill attacked Monica with that cigar, "back" is exactly where the elites wanted to go. In Pete Hegseth, with his crusader tattoos and membership in the Erik Prince groupchat and entire post-military career bankrolled by the Koch network, with his 2002 article in the Princeton Tory arguing that sex with an unconscious person does not constitute “rape” and his two-year lobbying campaign to pardon accused war criminal Eddie Gallagher—a man described by a Navy SEAL colleague as “perfectly ok with killing anybody that was moving” who had been turned in by six members of his platoon because he was that “freaking evil”—we might have perhaps the purest distillation of right-wing rape culture in all its arrogant, white nationalist glory.

Except, of course, it is now November 2024, and so for the past 412 days since the Israeli defense minister announced he was cutting off all food and water to 2.5 million largely innocent refugees, I have watched the forces of a thousand Eddie Gallaghers unleashed each day in the effort to dehumanize Palestinians into extinction. From November and December when we watched the IDF bomb every hospital and school in Gaza, to January when we saw the first large-scale protests to stop the entry of aid trucks into the territory, to the slaughter of more than 100 Gazans lined up for flour and the surgical assassination of foreign aid workers in the spring, to the emphatic and self-righteous calls by journalists for the IDF to adopt an explicit pro-sexual assault policy after ten prison guards were punished for sodomizing Palestinian detainees with hot metal rods. By the end of October, Gaza as a place cannot be said to exist, and all that defined the lives of the 2.5 million who once lived there has been obliterated, but the continued drive to destroy has only swollen, expanded to encompass Beirut and Damascus and even Amsterdam.

This week Ha'aretz reported an “alarming rise” in rape inside Israel, especially among people under 18 who had been displaced from the south after October 7; forgive me if I am not alarmed.

Throughout all of this Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken and their whole coterie of indistinguishably robotic flacks have stood unflailingly behind Netanyahu and his genocidal band of Jewish supremacist freaks, even as they openly plotted to sabotage his presidency in favor of one that might funnel the same tens of billions with more explicit enthusiasm and I guess, cooler tattoos. This week, when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense secretary and Bernie Sanders rallied around a dozen and a half of his Senate colleagues in three ceremonial votes against sending any more offensive weapons to Israel, President Biden slammed the court as “outrageous,” labored behind the scenes to smear the senators as treasonous saboteurs and issued a formal statement consisting of little more than an unabashed dog whistle to Jewish supremacy: “Whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas.” For thirteen months now, a Democratic presidential administration has been toiling to remind Palestinians and anyone who might sympathize with them that they are not by the standards of the ruling class fully human: “Your body, my choice,” as the Trumpists would say.

Which brings me to the challenge ahead. Trump and his cabinet of sickos are about to spend the next four years doing some sadistic, heinous things. And yet the fact remains that the bar has been set by bankrolling a brand-new ICC-certified genocide; that’s the achievement of Joe Biden. And if we want our countrymen to unite in rejection of the cruelty around which Trump has built his brand, we cannot pretend the Democratic Party of 2024 represents a spotless alternative. We are not going back.

[Vesper 28,803]

 

real-time top 50 billionaires' net worth

Musk is just exploding, Ellison now a firm number two.

Arnault is now worth 70B or so less than his high, and Google co-founders (Page and Brin) are tumbling (and will probably continue to do so as the US likely rips Google apart over the next year or so).

 

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#591aee713d78

	1	Elon Musk	$321.7 B	▶ $7.3 B | 2.31%	53	Tesla, SpaceX	United States
	2	Larry Ellison	$235.3 B	▶ $373 M | 0.16%	80	Oracle	United States
	3	Jeff Bezos	$213.5 B	▶ $1.1 B | -0.53%	60	Amazon	United States
	4	Mark Zuckerberg	$193.5 B	▶ $1.3 B | -0.69%	40	Facebook	United States
	5	Bernard Arnault & family	$157.0 B	▶ $2.1 B | 1.36%	75	LVMH	France
	6	Warren Buffett	$149.7 B	▶ $1.5 B | 0.99%	94	Berkshire Hathaway	United States
	7	Larry Page	$137.2 B	▶ $2.2 B | -1.54%	51	Google	United States
	8	Sergey Brin	$131.4 B	▶ $2 B | -1.51%	51	Google	United States
	9	Amancio Ortega	$124.7 B	▶ $2.3 B | 1.84%	88	Zara	Spain
	10	Jensen Huang	$123.8 B	▶ $4.1 B | -3.18%	61	Semiconductors	United States
	11	Steve Ballmer	$123.3 B	▶ $920 M | 0.75%	68	Microsoft	United States
	12	Michael Dell	$111.6 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.74%	59	Dell Technologies	United States
	13	Rob Walton & family	$109.0 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.80%	80	Walmart	United States
	14	Jim Walton & family	$107.7 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.81%	76	Walmart	United States
	15	Bill Gates	$105.9 B	▶ $931 M | 0.89%	69	Microsoft	United States
	16	Michael Bloomberg	$104.7 B	$0	82	Bloomberg LP	United States
	17	Alice Walton	$100.0 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.91%	75	Walmart	United States
	18	Mukesh Ambani	$99.3 B	▶ $2.9 B | 2.98%	67	Diversified	India
	19	Carlos Slim Helu & family	$80.9 B	▶ $80 M | 0.10%	84	Telecom	Mexico
	20	Julia Koch & family	$74.2 B	$0	62	Koch, Inc.	United States
	21	Francoise Bettencourt Meyers & family	$72.0 B	▶ $1.2 B | 1.69%	71	L'Oréal	France
	22	David Thomson & family	$69.1 B	▶ $200 M | -0.29%	67	Media	Canada
	23	Charles Koch & family	$67.5 B	$0	89	Koch, Inc.	United States
	24	Changpeng Zhao	$62.2 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	47	Cryptocurrency exchange	Canada
	25	Thomas Peterffy	$57.2 B	▶ $25 M | -0.04%	80	Discount brokerage	United States
	26	Stephen Schwarzman	$57.0 B	▶ $1.2 B | 2.12%	77	Investments	United States
	27	Gautam Adani	$56.7 B	▶ $910 M | -1.58%	62	Infrastructure, commodities	India
	28	Zhong Shanshan	$51.5 B	▶ $935 M | 1.85%	69	Beverages, pharmaceuticals	China
	29	Jeff Yass	$49.6 B	$0	66	Trading, investments	United States
	30	Ken Griffin	$46.7 B	$0	56	Hedge funds	United States
	31	Prajogo Pangestu	$46.6 B	▶ $606 M | 1.32%	80	Petrochemicals, energy	Indonesia
	32	Zhang Yiming	$45.6 B	$0	40	TikTok	China
	33	Jacqueline Mars	$45.3 B	$0	85	Candy, pet food	United States
	33	John Mars	$45.3 B	$0	89	Candy, pet food	United States
	35	Tadashi Yanai & family	$45.1 B	▶ $450 M | 1.01%	75	Fashion retail	Japan
	36	Ma Huateng	$43.6 B	▶ $713 M | -1.61%	53	Online games	China
	37	Giovanni Ferrero	$42.0 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	60	Nutella, chocolates	Italy
	38	Shiv Nadar	$41.6 B	▶ $1.2 B | 3.05%	79	Software services	India
	39	Gerard Wertheimer	$40.7 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	73	Chanel	France
	39	Alain Wertheimer	$40.7 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	76	Chanel	France
	41	Savitri Jindal & family	$39.3 B	▶ $503 M | 1.30%	74	Steel	India
	42	Mark Mateschitz	$38.0 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	32	Red Bull	Austria
	43	Lukas Walton	$37.8 B	▶ $640 M | 1.73%	38	Walmart	United States
	44	Robin Zeng	$37.7 B	▶ $1.3 B | -3.32%	55	Batteries	Hong Kong
	45	Abigail Johnson	$37.5 B	$0	62	Fidelity	United States
	46	Klaus-Michael Kuehne	$37.3 B	▶ $126 M | 0.34%	87	Shipping	Germany
	47	Reinhold Wuerth & family	$36.2 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	89	Fasteners	Germany
	48	Li Ka-shing	$35.7 B	▶ $62 M | -0.17%	96	Diversified	Hong Kong
	49	Colin Huang	$35.3 B	▶ $1.4 B | -3.86%	44	E-commerce	China
	50	Phil Knight & family	$35.0 B	▶ $701 M | 2.04%	86	Nike	United States

[Vesper 28,803]

King Charles’s $91 Million Coronation Has Enraged the British Public

The price tag was revealed in an annual report, but one anti-monarchy advocate speculates the true cost could be even higher.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/king-charless-dollar91-million-coronation-has-enraged-the-british-public

 

Britain's King Charles III wearing the Imperial state Crown carrying the Sovereign's Orb and Sceptre leaves Westminster Abbey after the Coronation Ceremonies on May 6, 2023 in London, England.by Ben Stansall/WPA Pool/Getty Images.

When Britain celebrated the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla in May 2023, the ancient ceremony came along with a ceremonial parade and days of celebration around the nation. On Thursday, the UK government announced that the festivities cost 72 million British pounds, or about 91 million dollars, a sum that has raised eyebrows amid the country’s ongoing economic doldrums.

In their annual report for the fiscal year that ran from March 2023 to March 2024, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport broke down their annual budget of 7.9 billion British pounds (about 9.9 billion dollars), and shared that approximately 50 million British pounds went towards the coronation weekend. The Home Office spent a further 22 million British pounds (about 28 million dollars) on policing for the events.

The department’s costs included the Westminster Abbey ceremony and associated programming across the weekend, including the Windsor Castle concert featuring Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, and a 300 person choir comprised of regular Britons, a day of Big Coronation Lunches across the nation, and a day of community service, which saw Prince William and Kate Middleton join in with their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. Further support for the events came from the Sovereign Grant, the public money given to the royals in exchange for their public duties and the proceeds from their historic property holdings. In their annual report, released in August, the Crown Estate shared that they spent 1.4 million British pounds (about 1.8 million dollars) on the coronation weekend over the course of two fiscal years.

Soon after Charles began his reign in September 2022, palace aides told Vanity Fair that the king wanted to stage a scaled-back coronation to avoid excessive public expense. But by December, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had announced that the weekend would include an extra bank holiday in the country, directing his cabinet to ensure the event showcased “the best of Britain.”

In their report, the DCMS justified the expense of the “once-in-a-generation moment” by pointing to its global impact. The coronation weekend “provided an occasion for the entire country to come together in celebration, and offered a unique opportunity to celebrate and strengthen our national identity and showcase the UK to the world,” the report read. “The coronation achieved more than 100,000 news stories and reached an estimated global audience of 2 billion people in 125 countries.” The report noted that the coronation reached more survey participants among the G20 nations than any other event put on by the department.

Graham Smith, CEO of anti-monarchy advocacy group Republic, believes that the sum put forward by the DCMS understates the true cost to the government. “I would be very surprised if £72m was the whole cost,” he told The Guardian. “It’s a huge amount of money to spend on one person’s parade when there was no obligation whatsoever in the constitution or in law to have a coronation, and when we were facing cuts to essential services.”

[Vesper 28,803]

GPAHE Brings You the Latest News in Far-Right Hate and Extremism   GPAHE’s new Resisting Authoritarianism initiative Project 2025 is here. This week, we’re highlighting how Trump’s nominees are linked to Project 2025 and hate and extremism through our new Resisting Authoritarianism initiative. GPAHE will continue to track and update you weekly on how Project 2025 becomes reality. We encourage you to explore this series to stay informed and engaged. GPAHE Takes Action Against Trump’s Authoritarian Agenda With Trump soon to assume the presidency, the U.S. is facing growing authoritarianism fueled by Christian Nationalism, extremism, and hate. At GPAHE, we firmly believe that as a nation we can stop these harmful agendas and reverse rights-restricting policies. We are not standing idly by and are already fighting Trump’s dangerous agenda in order to protect our democracy and human rights. GPAHE’s new Resisting Authoritarianism initiative delves into the key figures and policies shaping Trump’s agenda, including the Project 2025 authoritarian blueprint, exposing the individuals and groups poised to consolidate far-right power, and works to stop their progress. This week, we begin our efforts by profiling Trump’s nominees to powerful positions and their links to hate and extremism. Our research will be used to inform the upcoming Senate confirmation hearings. Pete Hegseth: An Anti-Muslim, Christian Nationalist “Crusader” in the Pentagon? Brendan Carr: The Impending Death of Independent Media and Free Speech at the FCC Tulsi Gabbard: How an Extremist Cult Shaped the Anti-LGBTQ+ Crusader into Intelligence Chief Kristi Noem: Anti-Muslim, Anti-Immigrant Zealot and “Killer” Governor to Lead Homeland Security Matt Gaetz: From Despicable Bigotry to Allegations of Sexual Misconduct, Uniquely Unqualified to be AG (one down) From exposing these dangerous figures to fighting discriminatory policies and defending democratic institutions, GPAHE is committed to action. We will not allow Trump and his allies to dismantle our rights or undermine our democracy. Stay informed through GPAHE’s newsletters, Project 2025 updates, and the latest reports on our Resisting Authoritarianism page. Together, we can protect the values that define our democracy.

[Vesper 28,803]

Media Matters weekly newsletter, November 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/media-matters-weekly-newsletter/media-matters-weekly-newsletter-november-22-0

• How Fox News powered Trump’s first term — and what that means for his second. 
• MAGA allies in the media make the case for Trump to ignore the Senate confirmation process. 
• The Trump administration is planning on deporting millions and millions of immigrants. Fox News is pretending the focus will be much narrower. 

• This week in stupid

  • The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles: “Atheist chaplains, in a way, have already existed for a long time and we just call them psychiatrists.”
  • Fox’s Jesse Watters said Trump’s cabinet picks are there to be good on TV: “This is a federal bureaucracy. It runs itself.”
  • Newsmax's Greg Kelly: Matt Gaetz “could always come and work here at Newsmax, as he has done quite a bit over the past couple of years.” 
  • Jesse Watters suggested a “special prosecutor” role for Matt Gaetz. 
  • Tomi Lahren said the nomination and withdrawal of Matt Gaetz for attorney general “has the art of the deal written all over it.” 

  This week in scary

  • Charlie Kirk’s guest Darren Beattie said “there will be Armageddon for any senator who does not step in line” with Trump’s appointees. 
  • Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk promised mass deportations and warned: “If a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you.” 
  • Project 2025’s Russ Vought: “The whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.” 
  • Fox’s Jesse Watters celebrated Trump’s promise to use the military to deport immigrants “the hard way.”

  Excuse me?

  • Fox host Brian Kilmeade said Matt Gaetz’s congressional persona is “not somebody to unify, rally around, that speaks for law and order.” 
  • The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles told Rep.-elect Sarah McBride: “How about you … act like a gentleman and stay out of the women’s bathroom.” 
  • Fox’s Laura Ingraham said Trump’s agenda will be “tough for the economy. There is no doubt about it.”
  • Fox Business host Dagen McDowell said firing thousands of career civil servants will be “a renaissance in America.”

  Check this out

  • Media Matters President Angelo Carusone discussed how Trump secretary of defense pick and former Fox host Peter Hegseth “sees the world through crusader terms.” 
  • Media Matters’ Matt Gertz discussed the revolving door between Fox and the second Trump administration with On the Media.

Edited 3 hours ago by Vesper